Amazon.com Guide to Marie-Antoinette

Maxime de la Rocheterie on Marie-Antoinette

"She was not a guilty woman, neither was she a saint; she was an upright, charming woman, a little frivolous, somewhat impulsive, but always pure; she was a queen, at times ardent in her fancies for her favourites and thoughtless in her policy, but proud and full of energy; a thorough woman in her winsome ways and tenderness of heart, until she became a martyr."

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

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Saturday, December 1, 2012

The separation of sex and procreation has also spawned the deadly
plague of America’s largest entertainment industry: pornography. The
author refers to surveys reporting that “65% of boys age sixteen and
seventeen report having friends who regularly download Internet
pornography… and another study relates that “watching sex on television
predicts adolescent initiation of sexual behavior,” while a third finds
that “men who use pornography have lost the ability to relate or be
close to women. They have trouble being turned on by ‘real’ women and
their sex lives, with their girls or wives, collapse.” In addition, the
use of the Pill or other forms of contraception along with alcohol
produce what Eberstadt refers to as “the hook-up” culture at ‘Toxic U.”
This environment was memorably portrayed in author Tom Wolfe’s novel I am Charlotte Simmons.

One campus psychiatrist has written a book that details the common
denominators of his college patients: “drinking to oblivion, drugging,
one night sex, sexually transmitted diseases and all the rest of the
hook up-culture trappings.” A WashingtonPost writer reports that hooking up has become the “primary” sexual interaction of the young.

Eberstadt points out that one way to push back Toxic U is to bring
back early marriage. The most compelling reason for the hookup culture
is not a change in human nature. It is not even a caving in to peer
pressure. It is, rather, a perverse efficiency. Students who do not
expect to marry anyone they meet in college have no reason to “invest”
in their romantic partners. The greatest victims are young women, whose
nature is being ignored at great peril—to them. They are weaker
constitutionally in the sense that the very behaviors that define “Toxic
U—binge drinking and hooking up—are documented and said by all,
including remorseful girls themselves, to be more likely to damage girls
than boys.” (Read entire article.)

2 comments:

I would agree. I came to the conclusion awhile ago that young males (by which I mean, up to age 45, sigh), do not commit unless it is pressed upon them or they have **individual** and personal reasons for wanting to do so. Society no longer provides them with a general demand for commitment and associated expectations of respect for females, nor does society give them any understanding of its benefits.

Nothing new under the Sun regarding the sexual drive of young people except..and this is a biggie...the lax social taboos that prevail today against premarital sex and 'hooking up'. That went a long way in my day toward encouraging chastity, that, and fear of my mother, a healthy fear I must add. LOL. Saved me from falling into lots of muck and mire.

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